Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Just about any time I read an article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker magazine, I am struck with a question so all-consuming, it could only be described as religious: "God, why did you give such a hugely disproportionate share of critical faculties to Adam Gopnik, thereby depriving the rest of us of our due?" I'm sure that this question must appear in Job somewhere, encoded or hidden so cleverly that only the most penetrating exegesis could uncover it. Well, most recently in the magazine, Gopnik has posed another historical-religious question of his own in an article entitled, "What did Jesus Do? Reading and Unreading the Gospels." Following is a long-ish and typically incisive passage from that article about narrative. (The image at right was used in the article, it's Salvador Dalí's "Christ of St. John of the Cross.)

"As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to
bits, and eat the bits we like. Still, a real, unchangeable difference
does exist between what might be called storytelling truths and
statement-making truths—between what makes credible, if sweeping, sense
in a story and what’s required for a close-knit metaphysical argument.
Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative. The idea,
for instance, that the ring of power should be given to two undersized
amateurs to throw into a volcano at the very center of the enemy’s camp
makes sound and sober sense, of a kind, in Tolkien; but you would never
expect to find it as a premise at the Middle Earth Military Academy.
Anyone watching Hamlet will find his behavior completely
understandable—O.K., I buy it; he’s toying with his uncle—though any
critic thinking about it afterward will reflect that this behavior is a
little nuts.

In Mark, Jesus’ divinity unfolds without quite making
sense intellectually, and without ever needing to. It has the hypnotic
flow of dramatic movement. The story is one of self-discovery: he
doesn’t know who he is and then he begins to think he does and then he
doubts and in pain and glory he dies and is known. The story works. But,
as a proposition under scrutiny, it makes intolerable demands on logic.
If Jesus is truly one with God, in what sense could he suffer doubt,
fear, exasperation, pain, horror, and so on? So we get the Jesus
rendered in the Book of John, who doesn’t. But if he doesn’t suffer
doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, and horror, in what sense is his death a
sacrifice rather than just a theatrical enactment? A lamb whose throat
is not cut and does not bleed is not really much of an offering.

None
of this is very troubling if one has a pagan idea of divinity: the Son
of God might then be half human and half divine, suffering and
triumphing and working out his heroic destiny in the half-mortal way of
Hercules, for instance. But that’s ruled out by the full weight of the
Jewish idea of divinity—omnipresent and omniscient, knowing all and
seeing all. If God he was—not some Hindu-ish avatar or offspring of God,
but actually one with God—then God once was born and had dirty diapers
and took naps. The longer you think about it, the more astounding, or
absurd, it becomes. To be really believed at all, it can only be told
again.

So the long history of the early Church councils that tried
to make the tales into a theology is, in a way, a history of coming out
of the movie confused, and turning to someone else to ask what just
happened."

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NOTE: PLEASE VISIT www.workingnarratives.org for weekly blog posts on storytelling and social change. "Inside Stories" is only updated very rarely now, but please read the archives for posts on the many forms of storytelling -- from journalism to genealogy to psychology to film to literature to walking tours and more. Also check out the podcast archive! You can email me at paulvdc [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks for visiting!